Here’s what the College Football Playoff bracket would look like based on updated rankings
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Here’s where we are right now, on Nov. 4, with the release of the first College Football Playoff rankings for 2025. With that much-anticipated release on Tuesday night, we finally know what the matchups would look like if somehow the Week 11 rankings were also the reality at season’s end.
We’ll start with the first-round byes, which would be held by defending national champion Ohio State, Indiana, Texas A&M and SEC rival Alabama, in that order of seeding 1 through 4. Those 4 behemoths would be sitting around watching those juicy first-round matchups come December.
Now, about those first-round matchups. They would take place on campus at the higher seed. Based on the CFP rankings released on Tuesday night, we would get a first-round showdown between 9th-seeded Oregon and 8th-seeded Texas Tech in Lubbock, with the winner of this matchup facing top-seeded Ohio State.
In another first-round showdown, No. 12 seed Memphis would travel to Athens to face 5th-seeded Georgia, with the winner taking on No. 4 seed Alabama.
Virginia would be seeded 11th based on the current rankings, and the Cavaliers would take on another SEC team in 6th-seeded Ole Miss. The winner of the matchup in Oxford would face No. 3 seed Texas A&M.
Notre Dame would be the 10th seed based on Tuesday’s rankings, and the Fighting Irish would head to Provo to face 7th-seeded BYU. The winner of that matchup would advance to face No. 2 seed Indiana.
Here is the complete CFP bracket, as it stands right now anyway:
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
